Constitutional fundamentalism?

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The principles of Rule of Law, Judicial Review and the Living Tree approach to statutory interpretation actually serve to promote legal stability.

When the courts set down strong interpretations of the meaning of constitutional language it sets a framework within which public policy is made. Legislatures can continue to test the limits, and the courts have the ability to make those limits work in the practicalities of the time that they are being considered.

Strict construction is nothing more than a short road to constitutional obsolescence. There are only two options for keeping a constitution relevant: rewrite it continuously, or interpret it contemporaneously.

Given how stunningly glacial your legislatures are, and how politically paralysed you become on any issue involving meaningful disagreement, how could you possibly expect to successfully rewrite your constitution? You would be bogged down in a never ending debate on abortion, gay marriage and flag burning while the issues that actually go to your national security and prosperity lie ignored by all but the policy wonks.

Without the courts you would have been reduced to irrelevance after the Civil War, never to reemerge from your political impasse.

I thought you were talking about "strict constuctionists" vs "Loose Constructionists". The former being thoose ( i believe scalia is one) who say we have to go by strictly what the words of the constitution say rather than go by the spirit of the words and not by the letter.Jugges cant just fudge things to adapt to modern times. You can only change the constitotion by going through the whole congressional process of amending the constitution.

Strict constructionists could indeed be said to be a secular equivalent of "Fundamentalists".

But you seem to be talking about something else.

If I understand you - you're saying that there is a new kind of religous zealot in america today who believes in something akin to the devine right of kings- that God somehow guided the framers of the constitution to create the documnet they came up with in a way that makes our constititution a mandate directly from god himself ( kinda like folks who claim that god guided the team of scholars who created the King James Bible toward making a perfect bible).

Never heard of that creed before.
I would think that that idea would create contradictions. For one thing the Consitituion is partially about seperation of Church and State. So claiming that God created the US Constitution itsself violates the US constitution - I would think!

The strict constructionists aren't particularly concerned with stare decisis. Since the court has gone over to the conservatives, more decisions have been overturned than ever before. The conservatives have proven far more willing to overrule previous court decisions and the legislature. The conservatives have been far more activist than the liberal court of the Warren era, if you look at it by the statistics.